


a pound of cure

by starsshinedarkly77



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cuddling, Emetophobia, Established Relationship, Fluff, Graphic depictions of vomiting, Hurt/Comfort, Hux is sweet to him anyway, I'm serious be careful, Kylo is a baby when he's sick, M/M, Sick Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 03:43:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7250605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsshinedarkly77/pseuds/starsshinedarkly77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When Hux gets home, Kylo has his head in the toilet."</p>
<p>Kylo is maybe probably dying of stomach flu, but at least he has a good boyfriend to take care of him on his deathbed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a pound of cure

**Author's Note:**

> Well hello. This is nothing but gross, gross fluff; consider it a companion of sorts to my last fic. I just had to get some hurt and comfort flowing in the other direction of this ship. One day I'm actually gonna write something serious, but today isn't that day. I hope you enjoy it, for what it is :)

When Hux gets home, Kylo has his head in the toilet.

He doesn’t quite know how long he’s been here. He’s bleary-headed and there’s no clock anywhere in sight, especially not with his face crammed into the toilet bowl. He hasn't been able to get up to go get his phone; every time he tries to stand his stomach gives another sickening lurch and excruciating cramp and he has to drop frantically back down onto his knees (he’s going to have bruises tomorrow) to make sure he throws up in the toilet and not all over the bathroom floor.

Kylo rests his sweaty forehead on the toilet seat as he listens to Hux move through the apartment, his loafers tapping rhythmically against the hardwood floors. The sound of doors opening and shutting echo oddly in the still, quiet apartment as Hux systematically checks each room for Kylo and, eventually, fails to find him.

“Kylo?” Hux has pitched his voice so that it fills the whole space of their apartment, so that it goes through every wall and can reach Kylo wherever he is. Hux began doing that after Kylo took up retreating to the linen closet and covering himself with towels and spare sheets whenever he had a panic attack; usually, Hux will call for him and Kylo, sometimes unable to speak through the crushing weight of the fear in his chest, will knock on the inside of the linen closet door in response. Today, fortunately, is not one of those days.

Unfortunately, he still feels completely and totally shitty. It’s just a different flavor of shitty.

“Love? Are you home?”

Kylo licks his dry, sour-tasting lips and tries to find enough voice to respond. “In here,” he calls weakly. His voice is raspy and reverberates inside the white porcelain surface of the toilet bowl. It hurts to speak; his throat feels burnt, ragged from throwing up.

The bathroom door creaks open, and Kylo feels, rather than sees, Hux standing in the doorway, suspended there momentarily as he takes in the sight of Kylo kneeling pathetically on the tile floor. “Lord,” Kylo hears him say, and then his loafers are squeaking across the tile and he is kneeling down next to Kylo, his hand coming to rest gently on the middle of Kylo’s back, between his hunched shoulder blades. Even through the fabric of his shirt Hux’s palm feels cool and soothing to his flushed, sweaty skin.

“Are you alright?” Hux asks him, slipping immediately into what Kylo calls his ‘mother hen mode’, which Hux always vehemently denies he has. Hux is seemingly allergic to admitting he has feelings most of the time, but Kylo has learned to read his nuances well, knows the patterns of his behavior as well as he knows his own, and there’s no denying that Hux tends to fuss over him when he’s ill or injured. His voice has gone soft, now, and he’s pushing Kylo’s damp hair away from his face, lifting up his chin, pressing the back of his hand to Kylo’s forehead to check him for fever, even though he’s said a million times that that’s a completely inaccurate way to check for a fever in the first place. It’s a gesture born purely of Hux’s instinct to care for him, full up to the brim with gentleness and intimacy, and Kylo appreciates it, or would appreciate it if he didn’t feel like absolute dogshit garbage.

“I’m dying,” he groans, looking up at Hux as well as he can manage. His mouth feels like it’s full of sand. “I literally feel like someone’s fucking stabbing my guts.”

“Did you throw up?” Hux asks him, probably very graciously pretending he can’t smell the stench of the vomit on Kylo’s breath, and when Kylo nods: “How many times?” His eyebrows are furrowed slightly in concern, creasing his forehead.

Kylo drops his head back down a little. “I dunno…probably like, four or five. I lost count. It’s fucked. It’s so fucked. Please help me.” The slightly dulled ache in his stomach is building up again, and he has to grit his teeth together to keep any embarrassing sounds from coming out, even though all he wants to do is wail and writhe around in agony for a little while.

“What happened?” Hux murmurs, in a sweet, careful tone that Kylo has only heard him use a handful of times. “Did you eat something bad, or have you picked up a bug from somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” Kylo gasps out, rocking slightly on his heels. He wraps the arm that he’s not using to brace himself against the toilet bowl around his abdomen, squeezes, as if that will stop the pain somehow, as if it will hold the contents of his stomach where they belong instead of letting them rise up into his throat. “I don’t know, I don’t _know_ , fuck fuck **_fuck_**.”

It feels as thought someone is raking knives along the inside of his stomach, or possibly like he’s swallowed a bunch of broken glass and it’s puncturing him from the inside out, that’s how badly it hurts. Nausea crashes over him in a wave, pulling him under, drowning him, and he gags.

Gags again, and that’s all it takes.

He whimpers as he pitches forward, hair falling back towards his face as he hunches over the toilet and starts to retch. At first, he thinks there’s nothing left in his stomach to bring up, but his body is apparently all about proving him wrong today, and his already-aching throat burns as he throws up for the fifth (sixth?) time today. It’s not much more than a bit of translucent brown fluid, but the sensation of being temporarily unable to breathe panics him; he automatically tries to inhale but can’t, and he ends up choking and coughing on the vomit in his mouth, tears slipping from the corner of his eyes with the pain and panic. Hux’s hand has started to move in slow, soothing circles across his back, and he’s muttering words of comfort and safety into Kylo’s ear. How he can stand to be this close to someone who’s throwing up, Kylo will never know, but he is grateful, so grateful that he is here now, that he’s no longer listening to the sound of himself retching and whimpering into an empty apartment.

When Kylo is able to catch his breath again, he spits into the water, spits again, trying to clear his mouth of the putrid, acidic flavor of puke. He wipes his mouth clumsily on the back of his hand and reaches up to flush the toilet. His fingers fumble on the handle and Hux intervenes swiftly, wrapping his hand around Kylo’s larger one and guiding it into place, helping him pull the handle down. The air gets easier to breathe when the immediate smell of the vomit disappears down the pipes.

Kylo leans back slightly, trusting himself to do so now that his nausea has abated temporarily, though the cramps in his stomach are still raging on full-force. There’s a little bit of puke clinging to the end of a lock of his hair, and he wrinkles his nose at the sight of it.

“You need water,” Hux says, always the voice of rationality, but Kylo doesn’t want water, no matter how thirsty he is, how good the cool liquid would feel to his ragged throat. Water is just another thing that can go in his stomach, and what goes down has the potential to come back up.

“I don’t want it,” he says weakly, and when Hux starts to stand up anyway Kylo grabs his sleeve. “Please don’t leave me,” he whines, looking pathetically up at Hux, turning on the pleading puppy-dog eyes as well as he knows how to. He doesn’t see the appeal of his own pouting face (he looks childish, ridiculous, to himself), but it always seems to work on Hux, and Kylo doesn’t bother to pretend that he’s above using it to get what he wants.

Hux releases a puff of air through his pursed lips, frowns, but he slowly kneels back down on the floor next to Kylo.

“You’re dehydrated,” he chides, even as he lowers himself further onto the ground, sitting with his legs crossed at Kylo’s side. “You need to replenish the fluids you’ve lost throwing up.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kylo mutters, resting his chin against the toilet seat. “Later.”

Hux huffs again but doesn’t continue his nagging. Instead, he reaches up with both hands to pull Kylo’s hair back away from his face. Kylo opens his mouth to protest, remembering the specks of vomit clinging to the ends of his hair, the specks that are now getting all over Hux’s hands, but Hux just shushes him and swiftly begins to French braid his hair, his long, slim, dexterous fingers making quick work of Kylo’s tangled locks. He’s inexplicably good at this, and always has been; he’s braided Kylo’s hair before, and the familiar gesture is soothing now, relaxing him as Hux’s fingertips massage against his scalp, gently tugging his hair as he knits it back around the base of his skull. When he runs out of hair to braid, he tugs the ever-present hair tie off of Kylo’s wrist and affixes it to the end of the braid before he lets go. Kylo’s now contained hair falls against his neck, thick and weighty, with a soft _plop_.

“Now that’s out of the way,” Hux says matter-of-factly, “Just in case.”

Just in case he throws up again. He doesn’t _want_ to throw up again - fuck, he’d be glad if he never threw up again in his life - but he has to admit that it’s a very real possibility, based on the way that his stomach has continued to churn, finding no relief from his most recent bout of vomiting.

Hux shifts a little where he’s sitting. “Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere more comfortable? How long have you been kneeling like that?”

Kylo shakes his head. “I can’t leave, it hurts worse whenever I try to move.” He’d much, much rather be curled up in bed, but he doesn’t trust himself to be that far away from the toilet right now - in the case of imminent barfing, he would never be able to get back to the bathroom in time.

“Could you lay down, at least?” Hux suggests. “Watching you like that is making _my_ knees ache.”

He has a point; Kylo’s legs are throbbing at the joints and quivering from the exertion of suspending his body upright for so long. He cautiously lowers himself back on his heels, and then into a sitting position. When he doesn’t immediately start gagging, Kylo slumps over and drops completely onto the floor, curling his body into the fetal position, whimpering as another cramp shoots through his abdomen at his change in position. His stomach somehow manages to hurt both more and less like this; the act of laying down is more comfortable overall, but it’s shifted his guts around inside him, and the pain has migrated and spread, pulsing in a way that makes his breath catch somewhere in the middle of his chest. It _burns_ , and there’s nothing he can do to stop it, no way he can twist his body to escape it, so he simply draws his knees up to his chest and tries to breathe through it. His body begins to rock involuntarily, seeking any way possible to relieve the pain, and the back-and-forth motion does inexplicably seem to take the very edge off of the searing cramps.

Hux, bless him, is using one hand to slowly caress Kylo’s side, rubbing the stretch of torso between his ribcage and his hip. His touch is gentle but the press of his fingertips is firm enough to massage out some of the tension that’s built up in his muscles.

“What can I do?” he asks, and his voice is so soft, his eyes are so soft that Kylo wants to cry. His concern, his _caring_ , means more to Kylo than he can ever bear to admit out loud. Some part of him, even now, is insistent that he doesn’t deserve such devoted attention but the rest of him is too exhausted and in pain to care about what he deserves; what he wants, what he _needs_ , is more important, just for now.

So he shifts, wiggling along the ground like some sort of large, cramping worm, until his head is resting in Hux’s lap. He buries his face against Hux’s thigh, breathing in the scent of him, that scent that is so unequivocally Hux, sharp and smooth and rich, and the smell of the laundry detergent he uses - that they _both_ use - sweet and light, like cotton, imbedded permanently in the fabric of his slacks.

Hux’s fingers brush the back of his neck, but Kylo takes hold of his hand, moving it to rest on the middle his stomach, at the apex of the pain. He hopes that he won’t have to say anything, and it turns out that he doesn’t. Without further prompting Hux begins to rub his stomach, fingers and palm smoothing over its surface, back and forth in a slow but steady pattern. It occurs to him to feel self-conscious about the hint of softness that exists there, just beneath his navel, but it feels so _good_ , and when Hux slips his hand underneath his shirt it feels even better, as the coolness of his hands meets the hot, tense surface of his belly. He sighs, long and low, his eyes slipping shut, and though the pain hasn’t subsided this is distracting enough to pretend it has, distracting enough that Kylo can blissfully focus on something else besides his rebellious guts and the looming threat of another round of puking.

“Is that good?” Hux asks after a minute, and Kylo lets out a brief, affirmative sound without opening his mouth.

“You know what would probably make me feel better, though,” he begins, and then pauses.

“What?” Hux asks, his voice still warm and indulgent, so much so that Kylo almost feels guilty for what he’s about to say next.

“If you blew me. I mean, I dunno, that would probably cure me.”

Hux takes one hand away from Kylo’s stomach and flicks him hard in the forehead. Kylo’s lips twist in a smile for what feels like the first time in ages.

“You’re disgusting,” Hux says dispassionately. He’s exasperated but there’s no heat behind it. They both know Kylo is joking.

Unexpectedly, Kylo yawns. Hux’s hands and the warmth of his body have settled him, and despite the hard floor underneath him he feels comfortable, safe, like he could fall asleep. He shouldn’t, he knows; his limbs will punish him for it when he wakes up, and this can’t be comfortable for Hux, either. Still, though, still, there is something about being wrapped in Hux’s arms, pressed so close to him, soaking up all the warmth and caring and loving that usually doesn’t come so easily to him. Kylo feels another wave of gratitude well up in him, and he takes one of Hux’s palms in hand once again, pressing a kiss to its very center, right at the place where it creases.

Hux responds by bending down, brushing his lips against Kylo’s. The kiss lasts only a millisecond, because Kylo pulls his head away almost immediately, holding his breath.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “What if I’m contagious?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hux murmurs back, and it’s a lie, Hux hates being sick, Hux would hate to miss work, Hux carries hand sanitizer wherever he goes and grimaces when he has to touch a stranger, but he wants to kiss Kylo and Kylo wants to be kissed, so when Hux lowers his head once more to touch his lips to Kylo’s own, he lets him, lets the kiss stretch long and deep and soft between them. His mouth tastes like puke and his stomach is still twisting like its full of snakes and his hip is starting to ache from being pressed against the tile floor but somehow, impossibly, this moment is perfect, full of loving intimacy that goes on and on, ringing in his heart, even after the kiss ends. It continues because it’s in Hux’s eyes, shining in the clover-green of his irises, and flowing through his fingertips where they meet Kylo’s skin, and he won’t say it but he doesn’t have to, because Kylo already knows.

“I love you too,” Kylo says.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at starsshinedarkly77.tumblr.com


End file.
